CofV 12.4: Distinguishing Social and Asocial

There might be one more in this series, might have to write about time and distance.

What follows combines with everything before, but especially with the other elements in 12.0-12.3.
12- Identifying Danger
12.1- Adrenaline Signs
12.2- You
12.3- Terrain
In some ways this all comes close to the Intent-Means-Opportunity triangle.  An immediate threat has to have all three.  Most of the time, you are the resource, the source of intent.  the threat is his or her own means and the terrain and your behaviors supply the opportunity.  But that's kind of simplistic.

Social and asocial are done for different reasons and so they have different requirements, from the bad guy's point of view.  The primary difference is that in most cases, social violence requires an audience.  For asocial violence the audience magically turns into witnesses. Some of the types of social, like the bonding GMD, are social within the group but asocial between the group and victim.  And some, maybe most, bad guys will try to get social benefits from asocial crimes (bragging about a mugging, for instance) or vice versa (going through the other guy's pockets after winning a Monkey Dance.)

So that's the big one.  Presence of others: generally social.  Absence of witnesses: generally asocial. Presence of a bonded group and you are alone: bad day for you.
Exception: certain types of predatory acts do use the crowds as camouflage. But by their nature, they can't be extended scenarios.

Second, the behaviors are different.  Social behaviors, even if they are going to violence, are normal.  We perceive them as normal because they stay on a script that we all know.  One of the things that makes predators so effective is that:
1) We are wired to assume and expect the scripts (corollary: when someone is clearly going off script most victims don't recognize it)
2) Many, especially the socially skilled and especially sexual predators, mask their predatory tactics in the social scripts.  For instance, there is a natural progression in romance where a couple meet, enjoy each other and gradually want to spend longer times in more privacy.  Which is also exactly what a process predator wants.  Predators learn to accelerate the natural process.

For our purposes, I'll call the social behaviors (including the social violence behaviors) 'normal.'  People don't consciously recognize normal, and without that recognition, abnormal (predatory) behavior is often missed, dismissed or excused. Missed- not seen at all.  Dismissed- seen, but ignored as unimportant. Excused- acknowledged as odd but doesn't count because there is probably a perfectly good reason.  So victims either don't see or ignore the warning signs.

Aside- One of the secret deeper reasons that I teach SD law as an articulation class instead of a decision making class is that if the person can explain things to a jury, they can also explain why they need to act to themselves in the critical seconds.  That helps some people slip the leash.

So you have to know normal consciously before you can recognize abnormal.

Basics are proxemics, facing and stance, hands and structure, and group behavior.

Normal proxemics varies widely across different cultures.  In North America and most of the places in Europe that I've visited, the comfortable distance for a stranger to stand is about a half pace beyond arms reach.  You will get a creepy feeling if people stand too close and you will elicit a creepy feeling if you approach inside the bubble.  It's an easy experiment to do.  This distance changes with intimacy.  Acquaintances are slightly closer, friends closer than that and intimates very close.  And there is a very particular range+eye contact that you will see with cons who have done prison time together-- standing very close but looking past each other's shoulder.

This bubble is not round.  It's best to feel this rather than read it, but that creepy feeling isn't engendered by a stranger approaching from the side until he is much closer.  Well within striking range.  It is even closer behind.  This is why we can handle stadium seating and sitting together on buses, but tables are a certain width.

The normal approach is to stand in front of you at the edge of the bubble.  An experienced predator will, while acting friendly and social, generally approach from the flank to be in striking range. (Not addressing ambushes from the rear, only the stuff you can see coming.) So, normal is from the front, out of range.  Anything else should put you on alert.  But remember this is very different in different cultures.  If you try to insist on your bubble in Arabia or South America do not expect to make friends or be accepted.  There are profound tactical reasons for maintaining a certain distance but sometimes the strategic reasons trump the tactical.  And remember, you are looking at signs of abnormality for danger, and normal/abnormal is measured from the threat's conditioning, not yours.  Someone from a close culture who maintains distance may read as sensible to you, but he might well do it because of mental illness or excessive aggression.

Facing and stance.  The normal monkey dance fighting stance is one of the stupidest possible ways to stand for fighting.  The combatants tend to be up on their toes, bouncing, arms akimbo and with feet and hips perpendicular (side to side) to the threat. And usually tense with muscles bulging.  Slow, stupid, no base and with targets exposed.  It is an attempt to look big, like a cat puffing out its fur.  Understand that even well trained martial artists also tend to do this if they get their ego involved.  It's an emotional reaction and is the default if you respond emotionally.  It is profoundly inefficient.

Almost all normal (social) interactions will have that foot position.  Social violence will have the crappy posture and foot position but will violate the bubble from the front.

A predator will blade up.  He will have his power in line with his target (you).  One of the elements that people miss, ignore or dismiss is that he may keep his shoulders and hips square with his feet bladed.  feet are important, not the rest.  The other thing is that if the threat approaches from the flank and faces the same direction as you it feels friendly (facing the same direction mirrors your body language) and the feet are naturally positioned for the power to be in line with the target.

Inexperienced predators may not know this.  Early crimes it is common for the threat to have no more experience than you do.  (He will get mentored later, or learn by trial and error).  So you may be mugged by someone giving all the signals of social violence (up on toes, shitty stance, loud) but with a gun.  Is a gun part of normal Monkey Dance behavior?  No it is not.  Therefor this is abnormal therefor probably predatory.  And this situation is very touchy.  Resource predation plus a fragile ego and a firearm is a recipe for disaster.  If the threat feels endangered or disrespected he will erupt.

That's feet.  Next hands. If there is a weapon, that tells you two things.  First, this is a potentially very bad day and second, he wanted you to see it for a reason.  If you live in a weapon culture, you know the rules of social violence (dueling) in that culture better than I do.  In my culture, monkey dances don't involve guns or knives.  If a weapon is involved it is either a predator or someone who was recently humiliated in a Monkey Dance trying to get his manhood back.

Aside-- Do what you need to do to survive, but never humiliate any one.  It never serves any purpose other than to stroke your own ego.

If a hand is out of sight, it could be good or bad.  No one keeps a straight arm with a hand hidden behind a thigh.  No one just rests his hand on his back hip under his jacket. But a lot of people stand with their hands in their back pockets and a flat hand like that means they feel no threat.  (This is a stacking point here: unusual body positioning plus signs of adrenaline?  Big red flag.  An alert individual showing extremely relaxed body language in a clearly dangerous situation?  Big red flag.)

Precursor moves.  Most people, for whatever reason don't just hit.  They pull back first.  They think it feels more powerful.  This chambering or loading is often disguised as turning away or glancing around-- and that last sweeping glance of the area is a final witness check just before things go down.

Groups and places.  If there are only two people at a bus stop and they are strangers, they keep distance.  All guys know the urinal rules.  There is a pattern to where people stand and which direction they face as  an elevator fills.  People that know each other stand together and talk.  If they see you, go quiet and split up, that's likely bad.

So with groups you look for coordinated movement, any separation that makes you the apex of a triangle or any static positioning that makes you walk between two people.  In pack behavior you look for groups (usually young men) moving purposefully or trying to intimidate/get a reaction from others.

All of this could be expanded, but these are the basics.

Qualified

There are no experts here.

To recap the last post and the comments on the last post- A “High level conversations” isn’t a matter of knowledge or experience, not in this field.  Knowledge and experience never hurt of course.  Not ‘never.’  If the experience is overblown or misremembered or poorly extrapolated it can go bad.  If the knowledge is of myth, folklore and received wisdom without a reality check the conversation could be very high-falutin’, but the information passed could be deadly.

Here’s the deal.  Extreme violence happens at the edge of what humans were evolved to handle.  Much of it happens in contradiction to our early conditioning about reality.  And it happens in a stew of stress hormones that affect perception, cognition and memory. 

My experience is that very few people experience enough serious violence that the lessons learned there replace social expectations.  Even fewer experience enough to get a handle on the sensory and perception distortion.  Only a percentage of those have the discipline, desire and/or job requirement to evaluate those distortions and compare them with the actual events (I will go on record as thankful for the hundreds of reports I had to write, though I hated them at the time).

And of those few, the number that have experienced more than one very small piece of this big puzzle are vanishingly small.  Soldiers learn part of it (different parts at different intensities depending on MOS and era); cops learn a different part; bouncers another part; targets for sexual assault a much different part.  As do the night clerk at the local Stop-n-Rob or any of the actors in a domestic violence cycle.  And cross a border or change the decade and many of the rules and social conventions of violence change.

So one of the students at the Oakland seminar asked if he was qualified to teach.  The sentiment was an echo of Pax in the comments on the last post.

I don’t know what qualified means. The best handgun instructor I ever had has shot exactly one man.  In the back.  It wasn’t a gunfight.  It wasn’t the way wannabe’s fantasize.  A bad man needed to be shot to save the life of a third party and my instructor did it in the safest, smartest way.

I can think of three (at least) of the top handgun instructors in the country who have never shot anyone.  Does that make them unqualified?  And some of their students have used the training and survived.  How much does that mean, really?

My jujutsu instructor, as far as I know, never went toe-to-toe with a PCP freak.  But he gave me the confidence to do it and the skills to be successful.  But one of the things Dave said, when I hit green belt and started questioning whether this stuff would really work: “I don’t know if jujutsu will work.  But I know you.  You’re a fighter and you’re adaptable.  You’ll make it work.”

And out of left field—my wife sometimes teaches belly dance and she’s used those concepts to vastly improve my understanding of body mechanics and increase my striking power.  Movement is movement and movement experts of any kind can help you.

So are you qualified?  Depends. Can you make people better?

One of my FB friends was assigned to do an essay on why he was a self-protection expert.  It was essentially a self-esteem building exercise, and he did a good job… but I would encourage every SD instructor to write a little private essay on why they are not experts.  To get a start on the very long list of things that they do not know.  It’s not only humbling, but it gives you a place to start when  you need to learn.

So, I don’t know qualified, but I can pick out unqualified in a heartbeat.

If you are there for your ego instead of the student’s improvement, walk away.

If you don’t know the basic context of modern self-defense (how attacks happen, SD law and the legal process, etc.) you aren’t ready to teach yet.  And if you haven’t, on your own, recognized the need and started researching this stuff, you aren’t responsible enough to teach yet.

If you think trying to teach martial artists to fight is the same as trying to teach a victim profile not to be targeted, you aren’t teaching what you think you are teaching.

If you need to be top dog, you might be teaching people to win but you are conditioning them to lose.  You are creating victims.

If you think SD is primarily a physical skill, you don’t understand the basics.

If you think your experience, whatever it is, qualifies you to talk authoritatively about things outside your experience, it’s a red flag.

If your techniques require a martial athlete in top condition to work, they’re inappropriate for self-defense.  And probably really inefficient.

The trouble with this list, of course, for those of you wondering about your qualifications is that they are much harder to see from inside your skin.  You have to develop a group of honorable enemies.

At the Big Kid's Table

A friend started an on-line discussion about why it was so hard to have a “high-level” discussion about self-defense and martial arts.

It isn’t.  Part of the problem is that he was trying to do it on the internet, and we all know what kind of person writes stuff on the internet (you have to imagine me looking around at this page for the humor to sink in).

In order to have a good conversation, you just need good people.  In order to have an intelligent conversation, you need intelligent people.  See a pattern here?

One of the big problems for potential students of self-defense and martial arts is that almost all are naïve consumers.  A naïve consumer is one who can’t tell a good product from a bad product. Most people, when it comes to anything related to violence, can’t distinguish knowledge from horseshit.  They simply don’t have a frame of reference.

And here’s where it gets interesting, in martial arts:  The naivety often doesn’t change.  When you get someone truly naïve, they have no truth to compare with what they learn and so whatever they learn becomes, to them, the truth.  And they can continue to learn and advance in rank and pass on knowledge and come to believe that they are very high-level practitioners with deep understanding… and their most basic facts are wrong.  They have a deep understanding of myths and many are willing to share it (or sell it).

In other endeavors, where success or failure are visible and undeniable, it is hard to stay this naive.  In other places stupidity hurts.  Not so in many martial arts (and one of the many places where sports arts have the edge).

And to other naïve people, they sound good.  Impressive.  To people who have experience, they sound like first graders trying to explain where babies come from. 

So that’s the first hurdle.  I know my criteria for people I trust.  Possibly more importantly I have enough experience to pick out the kuchi-waza practitioners fairly quickly.  Without that experience can most people even identify a high-order discussion?

Looking Ahead

Oakland has been a kick-- fun and rewarding.  Two more days before I can do a full After-Action Report.  Got to spend some time with Toby and make nefarious plans.  Got to really appreciate how Maija moves with a blade.  Got to play and think with some extraordinary people.  Blood, sweat and tears make a perfect training day, and none of it could have happened without Peter.

Looking ahead.  I still have Missouri, Bremerton WA, and Germany coming up.  Then surgery.  The doc says a long recovery.  He says eight weeks immobile and eighteen months off the mat.  That's unlikely.  I'll definitely have to change some process and for a short while really hold back on some things that I love... but change is growth.

So one of the plans.  Physical therapy works for some things, and some things trained early enough and hard enough are far less perishable skills than we think.  But my body will be a little different after this, atrophy and the like, and building of muscles is not the same as the building of trust in the muscles.  Flow and timing will have to be established, reinforced and integrated.

So it makes sense to start a regular class in late 2013 or 2014.  Short term.  Worked around my travel schedule.  Focused on (safely) playing at high speed, all ranges and natural rules. (Natural rules are things like "we don't want to hurt each other" or "you develop bad habits if you go fast in a slow drill." Artificial rules are things like a specific winning condition or pretending that X always stops things.)

And mostly about me and building up my timing, speed, endurance and flow.  Students and fellow explorers would be along for the ride.  Somewhere IN SW Washington.

Process and Pathology

Fevers can come from a lot of different things.  I was taught that sometimes it is simply the way your body kills viruses, or at least keeps them from reproducing.  The fever is part of the process of healing.  The virus is the problem, not the fever.  The fever is not just a symptom, it is also part of the healing process.  When we lower the fever, we ease the visible signs of the sickness, but we also may be prolonging the illness.  Protecting the virus.

Stress after a big event is normal.  For most people, a huge violent event completely restructures their reality map.  It can show you that everything you believe and value is context-dependent.  Or I can be harsh and more honest and say that you will come to know that almost all of your cherished beliefs about what people are were simply lies.  Pretty lies and pleasant lies and things that most of the population works very hard to make true... but lies none the less.

But because most people are good people and work hard to make some of the harsh truths less true. Might does, in fact, make right-- unless strong, good people stand up and through action and force of will make it untrue.  Violence works, and has for millennia and across all species-- until we came up with the will and the vision that we can make it not work. And that requires a capacity for violence as well. The only defense against evil violent men are good men with more skill at violence.

That's a digression. The point is that there will be a period of adjustment after a violent event.  Some will always be damaged.  Most of those I know are the ones trying to return to 'normal'.  The normal that a deep part of them now knows never really existed.  They feel that the only thing that can make them right is to go back to a state that they now know was always false.  Just like someone crushed with responsibilities wishing to be a child again.

Some will find a new normal, and that normal will largely depend on how much of what they were exposed to.  With a single aberrant event, they can rewrite a reality map pretty much like the old one.  Pretend the event was an abnormality.  With lots of exposure in different areas, the violence becomes the new normal and, at least for me, you feel a little awe over the power of will and human vision and technology that has made the natural so rare.  Peace occurs in nature about as often as suspension bridges.

A lot of the adjustment and 'healing' is a recalibration process.  One of the symptoms of PTSD is hypervigilance.  You know what?  There's some shit you don't survive without a hefty dose of hypervigilance.  It's not just a super-power, it's a necessary survival trait.  Does that make it pathological?  Are the people treating this symptom aware that they, the counselors and doctors, might have died in that environment without that 'symptom'?  Are they trying to help people be better, or help them return to normal?  In extreme environments, 'normal' is rarely better.

But it can get uncomfortable, and can be dangerous.  Just like going from dim light to bright light or vise versa, there will be, must be, an adjustment time.  That's normal.

And waking up from a nightmare.  That's part of the healing process.  Dreams are one way you work through things.  And part of the recalibration process is to snap awake in a cold sweat...and have someone you love hold you and say, "It's okay.  It's okay.  It's just a dream.  You're home now."

Don't confuse the healing process with the pathology. And it is a process.  And it is growth, not repair. You will be different afterwards.  Stronger, if you manage the process well.

DePauw

That was interesting.

A new time frame-- 2x6.5 hours, with actual lunch breaks.
The youngest group I'd ever played with.  Not just age.  In most of the other classes I believe average martial experience has been over 15 years.  So this group was young in a couple of ways.  And it completely didn't matter.

One of the original issues with training cops is that there is a wide variety of skills and experience.  You will get rookies who haven't even been to the academy yet, veteran meat-eaters who really know their way around a brawl and men and women right on the edge of retirement.  You'll get gym rat tac guys and desk jockey investigators; people in great shape just out of military service and and guys who have spent most of the last ten or twenty years driving a car and eating junk food.  And outside of work, some of them have been doing martial arts as a hobby since long before they were cops, some are competitive martial athletes and some have never taken a physical class of any kind since the academy.

You have to give them all something.  And the skills have to work, despite size or strength disparity, because cops don't get to pick their bad guys and the stakes are high.  If you teach shit you will wind up visiting hospitals or attending funerals.

It has to be easy enough for beginners to grasp; have insights that experienced martial artists can play with; physical enough for the meat-eaters but safe enough for administrations; challenging for everyone.  So it's not a simple scale.  An 'easy' class helps the beginners but bores the skilled.  An 'advanced' class confuses the beginners.  But that assumes 'easy' and 'advanced' are somewhere on a linear continuum and that assumption is a mistake.

So it was a good test and extra validation for the awareness-based-training model.  Thanks, Mac. The student who said she had no training was redirecting heads into walls like everyone else by the end of the weekend.  The instructor levels were working out how to adapt and analyze the information and drills.

Some of the lessons learned:
--Doing ConCom first really allows me to speed up part of the lecture, but only if everyone has attended ConCom.  The Conflict Dynamics section of ConCom is similar but not the same as the Violence Dynamics section of Ambushes and Thugs.
--There are things I like teaching that are only important to certain audiences.
--I can cut three hours out of the program and not feel like I am withholding critical, life-saving information.  Much.  Still insecure about leaving anything out.
--The biggest issue that was left out are the little talks about how to coach some of the drills.  Never realized how important that could be.
--I talk way too much and tell too many stories when I'm sleep deprived. I think these guys got more of the funny and icky stories than any other group. (Don't worry, I didn't waste much class time. It was mostly afterwards at dinner.)

So thanks to Brandon Sieg, an excellent host, and also a sincere martial artist who really wants the best for his students.  He takes the responsibility very seriously, thinks and plans.  He's created a FAST team that is both effective and creative, and a collection of good students (look at the students to see the instructor).

Good times.

CofV 12.3: Terrain

I'll be winging this.  Terrain is, literally, a big topic and I know I can just touch on it in a blog post.
Some things that need to be in there:
Cover
Concealment
Vision, including reflections and shadows
Movement control
Resource access
Escape routes
Unconventional applications

And all under the headings of how to read the terrain, how to use the terrain and how to manipulate the terrain.

There's way more.  This is stuff I do but rarely teach.  I'm finding a direct correlation between how well I can write or speak about something and how often I teach it.

Reading Terrain--
One of the elements to be aware of is flow of resources, and since we are talking about self-protection, you are the resource.  Bad stuff happens in predictable places. A mugger could starve waiting in random dark alleys. But the mouth of the alley between, say, the convention center hotel and the nearest strip club will give you a lot of unaware, out of shape, drunk, non-local, cash carrying businessmen.  Think about the victim profiles and where you would hunt for them.

Another element are forced flows.  Places where you must pass too close to a blind spot.  Places where the threat doesn't even move but his prey comes within arm's reach. There is a reason that women despise nightclubs with long hallways to the restroom.

Blindspots and vision spots.  Places you can't see into (blind corners, pockets of shadows) and places you, or the threat, can watch easily from.  This list expands as you get better at utilizing reflections and shadows.  And that skill is manipulatable as you can position yourself to take advantage of shadows, but you can also adjust a windowed door or place your sunglasses to maximize useful reflections.

Escape routes, choke points and death funnels.  How well you must know terrain and how you use it changes by mission.  Defensive strategies use funnels of death, offensive strategies need to bypass them quickly, for instance.  The 'funnel of death' is any small area that you and your team must bypass that allows the enemy to concentrate fire.  Choke points or bottlenecks in other words.  Escape routes are cool and the bad guy will likely have planned his.  You should look for them by habit.  The trouble with hiding strategies that have only one escape route is that by definition, when you are found, the threat will be blocking your escape route.

Cover and concealment.  Cover will stop a bullet, concealment will keep someone from seeing you.  Hiding behind drywall is concealment, but drywall won't stop most bullets.  It's not cover.  That said, I'm a little disturbed with the idea with cover as a category.  Concrete blocks are not necessarily cover for .308 rifle rounds.  I've shot through those.  Anyway, think of cover as a guideline.  Better than nothing and always use it, but don't count on it.  Also, remember, that some things change with angles. A stick-built house offers practically no cover... except if you are shooting down a hallway, the threat's bullets have to engage, because of the angle, sideways drywall and all of the studs.

Everything above you need to be able to see, but you also need to be able to exploit.  How do you see around a corner before you negotiate it?  How do you angle  to get maximum visibility at safest distance.  How do you cramp an assailant's movements?  How do you use the environment instead of simply mitigating the effects? (That's what I love about day two of the A&T seminar). How do you position yourself to maximize your useful information and minimize the threat's?

And what is there in the terrain that you can change?  Already mentioned adjusting doors and placing sunglasses to maximize vision.  There's more.  One of our old deputies always sat in a way that let him flip the chair out from between his legs in a flash.  My cell extraction method got a lot of juice from the fact that there was a concrete bench at knee height and I knew precisely where it was.  Sophisticated inmates who expected the team would soap their floors...and we countered that with kitty litter.

There's a psychological element to terrain as well.  A surprising number of people, even in emergencies, will respect a "Do Not Enter" or "Employees Only" sign.  Not bad guys, of course.  If they followed rules they wouldn't be bad guys.

Enough for now.  Big subject and I need to organize thoughts a little more.